Lady of Magick

by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

  Eithne MacLachlan, it appeared, could not perform an unseen summoning, and Una MacSherry, though she seemed to have a large store of elaborate summoning-spells by heart, did no better. They both appeared so much chagrined by this failure that when it came to Sophie’s turn, she felt almost ashamed of the ease with which her muttered Accedete! made the welcome-cup sail over her shoulder and onto her outstretched palm—though, after the debacle of the candle-flame, she could not help feeling some pride in it, too.

  Eithne and Una gaped.

  Cormac MacWattie raised rather shaggy grey-gold eyebrows and nodded at Sophie. “Well done,” he said, reaching to take back the cup. “Who taught you how to do that?”

  Sophie flushed and dropped her eyes. “I . . . taught myself it,” she said, uncertain and awkward in Gaelic.

  “You may speak in Latin, Sophie Marshall,” her tutor reminded her, himself shifting into that tongue. “You taught yourself the skill of unseen summoning? May I ask how?”

  Sophie shrugged uncomfortably and fought a strong urge to disappear. Why had she not dissembled, pretended to be less adept? She could not tell the truth; suppose she said, My husband was in danger of his life, and I could help him only by summoning a weapon I could no longer see for smoke and dust—these people could not possibly believe her, and indeed it would be almost worse if they did.

  “The circumstances . . . urgently required it,” she said at last. “I am not altogether certain how I succeeded the first time, but once I had got the trick of it, the next time was very easy.”

  Cormac MacWattie’s expression—lips pursed, eyes narrowed, head tilted on one side—suggested that he found this explanation insufficiently specific, but to Sophie’s vast relief he chose not to pursue it for the present. “The magicks we learn because we must,” he said mildly, still in Latin, “we seldom afterwards forget; but it does not follow that learning ought always to occur under duress.”

  “No, indeed, sir,” said Sophie feelingly.

  * * *

  The session ended with stern instructions for their subsequent meeting: for Sophie, an essay upon the theory of elemental magick, with particular reference to the magick of fire, and for the others, upon the theoretical differences between seen and unseen summonings. Sophie tried to flee to her carrel in the Library, but Eithne and Una crowded round her outside the door of Cormac MacWattie’s study, so that she could not escape unless by actually pushing past them.

  “How did you learn to do that?” Una MacSherry demanded. Her Latin was heavily accented, but so much more fluent than Sophie’s Gaelic that Sophie could scarcely fault it.

  They were both regarding her eagerly, expectantly, and she wanted nothing more than to erase herself from their notice; but that was one of the things she had promised herself never to do here, in light of the questions it must raise.

  “It is as I told Cormac MacWattie,” she said at last, haltingly; “there was a thing I needed very much, but I could not see it. It seemed to me that it could not be worse to try and fail, than not to try at all. That I succeeded was . . . a surprise to me.”

  She did not add that it had surprised Gray, also, and greatly (and unpleasantly) surprised their enemies. She did not add that when she recalled that moment of desperate wanting, she could feel again the smoke burning her eyes and her throat, the rough weight of the pikestaff slamming against the palm of her hand, and that it was all of a piece with the panic that seized her when she attempted any spell involving flame. There were few people in the world to whom she could imagine saying any of these things, and all of them but one were very far away.

  Eithne MacLachlan looked rather disappointed that Sophie could not (or would not) be more specific; Una MacSherry, however, was directing at her a narrow-eyed gaze that reminded Sophie uncomfortably of her sister Jenny in a suspicious humour.

  “Sophie Marshall,” she said thoughtfully. “Marshall is the name of that very handsome new lecturer—the tall one they say is a shape-shifter. And he is Sasunnach, too. You are . . . I suppose you must be his sister?”

  Sophie, ruthlessly suppressing another hot and perfectly absurd stab of jealousy, laughed. Gray would laugh, she knew, at being called very handsome, whatever might be her own thoughts on the subject. “No, indeed,” she said. “He does have two sisters, but I am his wife.”

  “His wife,” Una repeated. She frowned. “Then why do both of you use the same family name? Or are you cousins?”

  “Oh!” said Eithne MacLachlan, looking a trifle smug, Sophie thought, at knowing something which Una MacSherry did not. “Because that is the Sasunnachs’ custom, Una, for a bride to take the name of her husband’s family.”

  “That is our custom, indeed,” said Sophie, a little puzzled, “but what is yours?”

  “You must be very lately married,” Una said, ignoring the question and raising her eyebrows; “you cannot be more than seventeen.”

  Sophie’s face flushed hot. “I am twenty,” she said—which was essentially true—ignoring, in her turn, the first of Una’s implied questions. “Not that my age is any affair of yours.”

  “And you are not cousins?” said Eithne MacLachlan.

  “Certainly not,” said Sophie.

  “My mother and my father are second cousins,” said Eithne MacLachlan, in an explanatory tone, “but my father has forbidden me to marry any of my cousins—if the MacLachlan blood ran any thicker, he says, it would stand still—and I think it a great pity, for my cousin Niall MacLachlan—”

  “Eithne, enough!” cried Una MacSherry, clapping both hands over her own ears. “We are all sick to death of your cousin Niall MacLachlan!” Eithne subsided; Una dropped her hands and, turning to Sophie, said in an only slightly less belligerent tone, “Your husband—is he a shape-shifter, truly?”

  “Certainly he is,” said Sophie, “an excellent one. Why should you think he is not?”

  Una flushed, now, and her blue eyes darted away from Sophie’s. “I beg your pardon,” she said. “I ought not to have mentioned it.” Her voice was tense and defensive, however, rather than contrite; Sophie had unknowingly given some manner of offence.

  “I . . .” Acutely uncomfortable, Sophie cast about her for a peace-offering. “Should you like to be introduced?”

  Eithne and Una exchanged an unreadable look. It was Eithne who finally spoke: “If we are to spend all this year together with Cormac MacWattie,” she said, with a return of her earlier diffidence, “I wish we might be friends.”

  Sophie swallowed hard and essayed a smile. “I should wish the same,” she said. “I have not many friends in Din Edin yet.”

  Eithne grinned at her briefly and rather startlingly, white teeth and green-grey eyes glinting in her freckled face, and Sophie could not help grinning back. Perhaps Eithne was not naturally shy, but only intimidated by Cormac MacWattie?

  “Una,” Eithne said, and nudged her companion gently with one elbow.

  Una was not to be so easily won over, it appeared; she did raise her eyes to Sophie’s again, however, and repeated her earlier apology in a discernibly less hostile tone.

  “I don’t presume to speak for Una MacSherry,” Eithne said, perfectly cheerful now, “but I should very much like to meet your famous husband.”

  Sophie considered the angle of the sun. “He will be in his study now, I expect,” she said; “I believe he has students at the same hour as Cormac MacWattie.”

  “Well, then!” Eithne linked one arm through Sophie’s elbow and the other through Una’s. “Lead on, Sophie Marshall.”

  * * *

  Gray, absorbed in recording his impressions of his new students, started at Sophie’s firm knock at his study door—the same quick syncopated rhythm with which she had always announced herself in Oxford—and sprang up to open the door. Why was she here now, when they had arranged to meet in the library and walk home together to eat their dinner? Had she alre
ady fallen into some sort of trouble? Surely not—

  He was more startled yet to find, in the corridor outside, that Sophie had brought with her two Alban girls perhaps a little younger than herself. Sophie gave him a small, half-apologetic smile; her companions stared up at him in frank curiosity.

  Despite her evident embarrassment she introduced her new acquaintance very gracefully. Eithne MacLachlan shook Gray’s hand with a diffident smile, and Una MacSherry with a grave, measuring look.

  “I am delighted to make your acquaintance,” he said, and beamed at them as though they had really been Sophie’s friends—a supposition of which he was not at all persuaded. He tried to read in her eyes and the angle of her chin whether she wished him to invite all of them in and serve them tea, or to concoct some excuse to send them on their way.

  “Sophie says you are a shape-shifter,” the grave, auburn-haired one—Una MacSherry—said. “You would not care to give us a demonstration, I suppose?”

  Gray swallowed back the incredulous laugh that rose to his lips; Sophie had flushed scarlet in agonised embarrassment, and he did not wish to add to her discomfiture.

  “Una!” Eithne MacLachlan exclaimed, laughter and outrage warring in her soft contralto voice. “How can you say such a thing? Anyone would think—”

  She cut herself off abruptly, and there ensued a brief, whispered argument in rapid Gaelic. Sophie made a tiny stifled sound; Gray, glancing at her over the bent heads of her fellow students, could see that she was trying hard not to simply flee what was becoming a hideously awkward conversation. He tried to imagine what sequence of events might have led to this unexpected visit: Had Sophie been boasting of him? It seemed unlikely, though admittedly more likely than that she should have been showing away on her own behalf.

  Sophie blinked rapidly, and her lips silently formed the words I am sorry. Now, at last, Gray understood her: She feared that she was embarrassing him, as well as making a spectacle of herself.

  He grinned briefly at her and said, “I do not make a habit of displays for strangers; but as you are friends of Sophie’s—”

  And as all three of them stared at him in openmouthed astonishment, he shrugged off his coat, handed it to Sophie, and summoned up his magick.

  The sensations of the shift—the compacting of muscle and the lightening of bone, the unfurling of long flight-feathers from his outspread arms as they became his wings—were as familiar by now as the weight of Sophie’s head upon his shoulder or the rough-smooth slide of paper under his fingers. It was tidier to remove all of his clothes first and fold them up ready to put on again afterward, but of course one could not do such a thing in a public corridor, before the eyes of two young women one had only just met.

  It could not be denied, however, that clothing—and the presence of a neatly tied neck-cloth, in particular—made things rather more difficult. Fortunately Sophie was not unfamiliar with the problem, and in a matter of moments the confounding folds of linen were swept away and Gray was blinking up at her, on her knees amidst the abandoned garments.

  Sophie wrapped his shirt about her forearm and held it out, low; Gray hopped and fluttered onto the proffered perch, feeling awkward and ungainly as he always did in the interval before going aloft. Sophie climbed to her feet and turned to face Una and Eithne. Though Gray could not see her face, he imagined an expression of quiet triumph.

  Una MacSherry and Eithne MacLachlan, whose faces he could certainly see, looked satisfyingly gobsmacked.

  “May I,” the latter said, looking at Sophie, “may I—”

  “Gray?” Sophie turned her head, and Gray turned his, so that their eyes met; he bobbed his head once, an established signal, and Sophie turned back to Eithne and said, “You may.”

  Eithne MacLachlan put out a cautious hand and drew one finger gently along the slope of Gray’s folded left wing.

  Una MacSherry—the more sceptical of the pair—hung back, staring.

  “Have you never met a shape-shifter?” Sophie asked, in a tone of honest curiosity. “Is this talent very unusual in Alba?”

  It was very unusual everywhere in the known world, as Sophie well knew, though primarily—in Gray’s opinion—because learning to shape-shift required more patience, determination, and research than most mages could be bothered to devote to mastering a skill which was not, for the most part, of much practical use. He sidled towards her elbow and nudged his head reprovingly against her shoulder.

  “I have never met one, that I know,” Eithne MacLachlan admitted. “Though of course one cannot know without asking, and asking would be dreadfully rude.”

  Gray and Sophie exchanged a look.

  “I have heard Magister Rory MacCrimmon lecture about shape-shifting,” Una MacSherry said, “but I do not believe he can do it himself.”

  And there, Gray suspected, was the spark that ultimately had led to his perching on his wife’s arm in an upstairs corridor in the middle of the afternoon for the entertainment of undergraduates. He blinked his eyes at Una MacSherry and hooted in annoyance; then, because it seemed foolish to waste all the effort of a shift for no more reward than this, he gripped Sophie’s wrist through its makeshift wrappings to signal that he meant to fly.

  * * *

  Sophie blinked in surprise, but it was short-lived: Gray had not gone flying for nearly a se’nnight, and it was not to be supposed that he should waste this opportunity to do so. She looked about her for a convenient window, and finding none along the corridor that could be opened, she instead made for the top of the staircase that descended into the broad, high-ceilinged hall below, and tossed Gray over the rail.

  Una gasped, and Eithne choked back a protesting cry; they crowded against the railing, peering anxiously down into the hall.

  Sophie did not trouble to join them; instead she tripped lightly down the steps, and at the foot of the staircase paused, one hand on the newel-post, to watch the fun.

  Gray’s colleagues had presumably known themselves to be sharing their premises with a shape-shifter, but this seemed in no way to mitigate the astonishment with which those presently passing through the hall greeted the arrival in their midst of an owl whose wingspan measured more than four feet. A lecturer with an impressive white beard dropped his armful of scrolls and sat down abruptly on the floor; a pair of women walking arm in arm cried out in astonished delight as Gray glided past them; a fair-haired young man wearing a wrapped plaid and a severe expression blanched, turned on his heel, and fled at a rapid walk.

  Gray did not follow him out into the crisp autumn air, but flew two leisurely circuits about the hall and then, having apparently made his point, alighted on Sophie’s shoulder and waited to be carried in state back up the stairs.

  “Lazybones,” she scolded him; but as the weight on her shoulder was in fact rather less than a newborn baby’s, it was difficult to summon up any genuine affront.

  CHAPTER VIII

  In Which Catriona MacCrimmon Renders Assistance, and Sophie Makes an Unexpected Acquaintance

  In the course of the succeeding fortnight, Sophie attended Gray’s lecture and nearly a dozen more. Those read in Gaelic she found rather a frustrating exercise, until Catriona MacCrimmon, calling in Quarry Close to return a borrowed codex, found her struggling to decipher her notes and said, “Shall I come with you from time to time, and help you with the difficult words?”

  Sophie tried to demur—it was such an imposition, surely much more than hospitality demanded—but Catriona was so cheerfully persistent that continued refusal seemed churlish. “I thank you,” she said therefore, “very much indeed.”

  “Oh! I beg you will not think of it,” said Catriona. “It will prevent me from stagnating, you know.”

  As Rory MacCrimmon had predicted, Gray’s first lecture was so greatly oversubscribed that Sophie had no choice but to cram herself in amongst those standing at the back of the hall, for both the sea
ts and the aisles between them were entirely occupied—the front two rows, at least, not by students but by other lecturers, readers, and professors. She could see from Gray’s face, when he emerged to take his place at the lectern, that the size of his audience surprised him; he took it in stride, however, and delivered his remarks as confidently as if he had been speaking to half a hundred sleepy undergraduates at Merlin College.

  Having noted that the course of lectures on the fundamentals of magickal ethics—which all undergraduates in both theoretical and practical magick were required to attend, and upon which they should all be examined—was offered both in Gaelic and in Latin, Sophie attended both, and, with Catriona’s help, made a linguistic exercise of comparing her notes from each iteration and attempting to fill in the gaps. The substance of the first of these lectures presented no particular novelty—Sophie hoped that she did not need to be told that magickal ethics forbade her to work a sleeping-spell without the subject’s consent or to make use of a summoning to pick a man’s pocket—but gave her many an uncomfortable moment, by bringing to her mind instances in which she had, either unknowingly or from desperate need, violated a wide variety of the tenets elaborated in Dougal MacAngus’s lecture.

  She was particularly grateful for Catriona’s murmured translations when Mór MacRury’s lecture on scrying devolved into legal details which, rooted as they were in the unfamiliar laws, customs, and legal vocabulary of Alba, must otherwise have been entirely lost to her.

  “Courts of law have long tended to dismiss or discount the evidence of scry-mages,” said Mór MacRury, nodding at the blackboard on which, before beginning, she had inscribed the headings of her lecture: Scrying on trial / The scry-mage as expert witness / Compromising evidence / Reliable, fallible, or both?